Why do some developers consider Agile development to be nonsense?
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Why do some developers consider Agile development to be nonsense?
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Re: Why do some developers consider Agile development to be nonsense?
#2The micromanagement - if management doesn't trust you to get on with work without having to justify what you've done every single day, why did they bother hiring you in the first place?
Re: Why do some developers consider Agile development to be nonsense?
#3The micromanagement - if management doesn't trust you to get on with work without having to justify what you've done every single day, why did they bother hiring you in the first place?
People aren't perfect. It's easy to get distracted, get off track, think that you'd be able to get back on track if only you could get your head down for a couple of days, and suddenly two weeks have passed, you're miles behind, and the people waiting for your work are all thrown off track because it's not there yet.
Spending 15 minutes per day making sure that everyone knows how the team is doing strikes me as a very easy way to avoid that.
Heck, it can be significantly less than that, if you use a tool to keep your tasks up to date and can just say "I got the frobulator finished, and moved on to the doohickey. Dave's giving me a hand with a small holdup there, and it should be finished on time." at the standup then the whole thing should take less than five minutes total, except when there _are_ issues that need to be dealt with.
Re: Why do some developers consider Agile development to be nonsense?
#4The title is completely mangled.
The original (rather long) title is "Why do some developers at strong companies like Google consider Agile development to be nonsense?", and it seems it was shortened. There's a spurious "at" left in there now which breaks it.
Re: Why do some developers consider Agile development to be nonsense?
#5The micromanagement - if management doesn't trust you to get on with work without having to justify what you've done every single day, why did they bother hiring you in the first place?
It's not meant to be for that. It's meant to be let people know whats going on, because someone might know something that would save you time. I.e Collaboration.
Re: Why do some developers consider Agile development to be nonsense?
#6IF teams are using Agile like that there doing it wrong. It's meant to be recipe for collaborative, relaxed, friendly environment. Not a pressured hot house. If your goal is to use Agile to push developers to their limits, you've already failed the Agile Test.
You can twist Agile, based on your vision of good team is. So you have to get the right people to implement it. You have to approach it from the idea of it being a collaborative, friendly, no blame etc for it to work.
I've only ever used estimates in story points to prioritize things(That's why its so abstract), not to monitor and push developers. If I wanted that, i'd use actual time.
The idea of everyone is junior is also bad implementation. It means even the most junior person is capable of contributing using their solution over a senior persons solution. The right idea wins, not the right person. I can understand why this pisses of senior people though.
Re: Why do some developers consider Agile development to be nonsense?
#7The thing that I don't understand about the way Agile development is treated is that it is often treated like a silver bullet. As the article points out agile has use cases where it is effective but many treat it as a "Waterfall Killer".
Re: Why do some developers consider Agile development to be nonsense?
#8This article cements in my mind the issue: devs tend to take away from agile what they expect to find, rather than taking the time to understand the motivations and whole scope of activities.
Historically, most software development methodologies are excessively top-down, so people somehow still expect that from agile. Most devs are the sort that couldn't stand doing group projects in school, so the idea of organizing with teammates to produce something bigger and better than I could on my own is totally foreign.
If you don't explicitly name your development methodology, you still have one: you're practicing something called ad-hoc development. Unless you and your entire team are superheroes, there's an awful lot of knowledge being leaked away.
Here's the secret: software development isn't really about making computers work, it's about organizing knowledge. If your process focuses more on making the computers work than your institutional knowledge you're making a critical mistake.
Don't confuse some company's crappy engineering practices for agile just because they call them that. Stand ups are short. Period. If it feels like a "permanent PIP" your team could use some improvement. If it feels like a surveillance state it's probably not a very good implementation of agile.
Agile development is about making connections to your team members: individuals and interactions over process and tools. It sounds like the author's experience (as well as many other devs') is unfortunately in an organization that doesn't pay heed to that very first, most important agile principle.
Re: Why do some developers consider Agile development to be nonsense?
#9The term has been hijacked. It is useless. There is merit in the idea that it once encapsulated, but it has long since been co-opted to mean something almost completely the opposite of its original intention.
Re: Why do some developers consider Agile development to be nonsense?
#10The micromanagement - if management doesn't trust you to get on with work without having to justify what you've done every single day, why did they bother hiring you in the first place?
It's not meant to be for that. It's meant to be let people know whats going on, because someone might know something that would save you time. I.e Collaboration.
I've been in a lot of standups and that's never come up. (Yes, I know, the plural of anecdote is not data.)